Atlas Shrugged: Hank/Francisco. I could almost swear this *is* canon.
Atlas Shrugged is, in essence, 1100 pages of intensely character-driven philosophy. It's probably not the sort of book most people read with slash in mind. I'm not sure how they avoid it, though. It is quite possibly the single slashiest novel I have ever read. Ever.
Allow me to demonstrate.
Hank Rearden and Francisco d'Anconia. Both of them are in love with the same woman -- Dagny Taggart (who, we might observe, is herself scarcely female in anything but physical appearance). Hank owns a steel mill. Francisco owns copper mines. In the end, Dagny chooses to go with another man entirely -- and neither Hank nor Francisco resents this at all. Because of their philosophy, you see.
And also, clearly, because they are in love.
I've put the slashiest bits in bold, by the way, since there are so damned many. You have no idea how much slashiness I left out of this post.
So. Let's begin at the beginning. Hank does not like Francisco before he meets him... but Francisco wins him over pretty damn quickly. "Mr. Rearden," said a strangely quiet voice beside him, "permit me to introduce myself. My name is d'Anconia."
Rearden turned, startled; d'Anconia's manner and voice had a quality he had seldom encountered before: a tone of authentic respect.
And immediately, Hank becomes uncharacteristically desperate. Rearden's startled glance at him was like the involuntary thrust of a hand grasping for support in a desperate need. The glance betrayed how much he wanted to find the sort of man he thought he was seeing. Then Rearden lowered his eyes; almost closing them, slowly, shutting out the vision and the need. His face was hard; it had an expression of severity, an inner severity directed at himself; it looked austere and lonely.
Hank spends a lot of time trying not to like Francisco, and succeeds pretty well... until the very next time he runs into him.It was the muscles of his own face that made Rearden realize the nature of his reaction to Francisco's arrival: he noticed suddenly that he was smiling and that his face had been relaxed into the dim well-being of a smile for some minutes past, as he watched Francisco d'Anconia in the crowd.
He acknowledged to himself, for the first time, all the half-grasped, half-rejected moments when he had thought of Francisco d'Anconia and thrust the thought aside before it became the knowledge of how much he wanted to see him again. [...] He had caught himself glancing through the newspapers to see whether Francisco d'Anconida had returned to New York--and he had thrown the newspapers aside, asking himself angrily: What if he did return?--would you go chasing him through night clubs and cocktail parties?--what is it that you want from him?
This was what he had wanted--he thought, when he caught himself smiling at the sight of Francisco in the crowd--this strange feeling of expectation that held curiosity, amusement, and hope.
Hank listens as Francisco gives a big impromptu speech to some random wedding guests, and then they talk together. "What are you doing at this party?"
"Just looking for conquests."
"Found any?"
His face suddenly earnest, Francisco answered gravely, almost solemnly, "Yes--what I think is going to be my best and greatest."
Francisco is actually talking about Hank. Yes: canonically actually. :D But Hank assumes he's talking about some girl... Rearden's anger was involuntary, the cry, not of reproach, but of despair: "How can you waste yourself that way?"
The faint suggestion of a smile, like the rise of a distant light, came into Francisco's eyes as he asked, "Do you care to admit that you care about it?"
"You're going to hear a few more admissions, if that's what you're after."
And he does. Admissions like this one: "I wish--" Rearden began and stopped abruptly.
Francisco smiled. "Afraid to wish, Mr. Rearden?"
"I wish I could permit myself to like you as much as I do. "
"I'd give--" Francisco stopped; inexplicably, Rearden saw the look of an emotion which he could not define, yet felt certain to be pain; he saw Francisco's first moment of hesitation. "Mr. Rearden, do you own any d'Anconia Copper stock?"
Rearden looked at him, bewildered. "No."
"Some day, you'll know what treason I'm committing right now, but... Don't ever buy any d'Anconia Copper stock. Don't ever deal with d'Anconia Copper in any way."
"Why?"
"When you'll learn the full reason, you'll know whether there's ever been anything--or anyone--that meant a damn to me, and... and how much he did mean."
One day, after Hank hooks up with Dagny, he brings up the subject of Francisco to her. [...] when I look at him, I feel that if ever there was a man to whom I would entrust my life, he's the one."
She gasped. "Hank, are you saying that you like him?"
"I'm saying that I didn't know what it meant, to like a man, I didn't know how much I missed it--until I met him. "
"Good God, Hank, you've fallen for him!"
"Yes--I think I have." He smiled.
And one day, Francisco turns up at Hank's office at the steel mills. Ken Danagger, another industrialist, has just quit his business and disappeared. Francisco is thinking about this... but evidently Hank is only thinking about Francisco. :D"Why did you come here?"
"You don't want me to answer, Mr. Rearden. You wouldn't admit to me or to yourself how desperately lonely you are tonight. If you don't question me, you won't feel obliged to deny it. Just accept what you know, anyway: that I know it."
Taut like a string pulled by anger against the impertinence at one end and by admiration for the frankness at the other, Rearden answered, "I'll admit it, if you wish. What should it matter to me, that you know it?"
"That I know and care, Mr. Rearden. I'm the only man around you who does."
"Why should you care? And why should I need your help tonight?"
"Because it's not easy to have to damn the man who meant most to you."
"I wouldn't damn you if you'd only stay away from me."
Francisco's eyes widened a little, then he grinned and said, "I was speaking of Mr. Danagger."
For an instant, Rearden looked as if he wanted to slap his own face, then he laughed softly and said, "All right. Sit down."
While they're talking, the alarm sounds; one of the furnaces at the mills has broken. Francisco runs faster than Rearden to get to the furnace, and begins repairing it by an art "which Rearden had not believed any man to be trained to perform any longer." There was no time to form words, to think, to explain, but he knew that this was the real Francisco d'Anconia, this was what he had seen from the first and loved--the word did not shock him, because there was no word in his mind, there was only a joyous feeling that seemed like a flow of energy added to his own.
HE LOVES HIM. And then he saves his life, too, just for good measure. [...] he thought that a leap across the distance between them on the slippery, crumbling ridge would mean the death of both of them--and the second moment was when he landed at Francisco's side, held him in his arms, hung swaying together between space and ridge, over the white pit, then gained his footing and pulled him back, and, for an instant, still held the length of Francisco's body against the length of his own, as he would have held the body of his only son. His love, his terror, his relief were in a single sentence:
"Be careful, you goddamned fool!"
And by god if Hank doesn't then proceed to dress Francisco's wounds. Catering to the h/c crowd, much? :D"Are you hurt?"
"No... no, not at all."
"Come here," ordered Rearden, opening the door of his bathroom.
"Look at yourself."
"Never mind. You come here."
For the first time, Rearden felt that he was the older man; he felt the pleasure of taking Francisco in charge; he felt a confident, amused, paternal protectiveness. He washed the grime off Francisco's face, he put disinfectants and adhesive bandages on his temple, his hands, his scorched elbows. Francisco obeyed him in silence.
Was it really necessary to wash Francisco's face for him? Surely he is capable of washing his own face. So Hank must be doing this because he's enjoying it.
Later, Hank ends up staying at the same hotel where Francisco is staying, and decides to drop in, much as Francisco dropped in on him. [Rearden] had tried for hours to ignore an emotion that felt like the pull of homesickness: his awareness that the only man whom he longed to see was here, in this hotel, just a few floors above him.
He had caught himself, in the past few weeks, wasting time in the lobby whenever he entered the hotel or left it, loitering unnecessarily at the mail counter or the newsstand, watching the hurried currents of people, hoping to see Francisco d'Anconia among them. He had caught himself eating solitary dinners in the restaurant of the Wayne-Falkland, with his eyes on the curtains of the entrance doorway. Now he caught himself sitting in his room, thinking that the distance was only a few floors.
He rose to his feet, with a chuckle of amused indignation; he was acting, he thought, like a woman who waits for a telephone call and fights against the temptation to end the torture by making the first move. There was no reason, he thought, why he could not go to Francisco d'Anconia, if that was what he wanted. Yet when he told himself that he would, he felt some dangerous element of surrender in the intensity of his own relief.
Going upstairs, he enters and finds Francisco sprawled on the floor with a pencil and some blueprints.In a moment, Francisco raised his head. In the next instant, he flung his body upward to a kneeling posture, looking at Rearden with a smile of incredulous pleasure. In the next, he seized the drawings and threw them aside too hastily, face down.
"What did I interrupt?" asked Rearden.
"Nothing much. Come in." He was grinning happily. Rearden felt certain that Francisco had waited, too, had waited for this as for a victory which he had not quite hoped to achieve.
After a while, Francisco starts pacing and exclaiming about injustice. "Thanks," said Rearden.
"For what?"
"For what you're trying not to show. But don't worry about me. I'm still able to stand it... You know, I didn't come here because I wanted to talk about myself or even about the trial."
"I'll agree to any subject you choose--in order to have you here." He said it in the tone of a courteous joke; but the tone could not disguise it; he meant it. "What do you want to talk about?"
"You. "
Francisco stopped. He looked at Rearden for a moment, then answered quietly, "All right."
Francisco ends up giving a gigantic lecture about how sex is an expression of a man's own sense of value. Relevant to the slashiness is this bit: "[...] You're the man who would know that just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love--and just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool's self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one's code of values. It's the same issue, and you would know it."
Keep in mind, Hank has already admitted that he loves Francisco. If platonic love is "hypocrisy," and there's love between Hank and Francisco -- well, you work it out. ;)
During this talk, the boys say far too many mutually-adoring things to transcribe them all. But after a while, Rearden mentions to Francisco that he has bought a shipment of copper from Francisco's company. Francisco reacts with horror, and then despair. "Francisco... what's the matter?"
"Hank, I..." He shook his head, stopped, then stood up straight. "Mr. Rearden," he said, in a voice that had the strength, the despair, and the peculiar dignity of a plea he knew to be hopeless, "for the time when you're going to damn me, when you're going to doubt every word I said... I swear to you--by the woman I love--that I am your friend. "
The ships carrying the copper sink. For a while, Hank hates Francisco -- and when he walks in on Francisco and Dagny talking together, and discovers that she is the woman Francisco loves, he slaps Francisco across the face. The heir of the d'Anconias stood thrown back against a table, clasping the edge behind him, not to support himself, but to stop his own hands. [...] She saw his convulsed fingers struggling to grow fast to the table's edge, she wondered which would break first, the wood of the table or the bones of the man, and she knew that Rearden's life hung in the balance. [...]
Motionless but for the slow curve of his head, Francisco turned to Rearden. She saw his hands leave the edge of the table and hang relaxed by his sides. [...] there was nothing in Francisco's face except the exhaustion of effort, but Rearden knew suddenly how much this man had loved him.
After Francisco leaves, Dagny admits that he was her first love. Rearden fucks her senseless, in conquest. They then have a cigarette. She saw his eyes move to the entrance door once in a while and remain on it for long moments, as if he were still seeing the man who had left.
He said quietly, "He could have beaten me by letting me have the truth, any time he wished. Why didn't he?"
She shrugged, spreading her hands in a gesture of helpless sadness, because they both knew the answer. She asked, "He did mean a great deal to you, didn't he?"
"He does."
Many months later, Francisco blows up all of his own copper mines, and disappears. [Rearden] did not want to mention today's event, he did not want to speak of Francisco, but she noticed, as they sat at the table, that the strain of a resisted smile kept pulling at the hollows of his cheeks. She knew whom he meant, when he said suddenly, his voice soft and low with the weight of admiration, "He did keep his oath, didn't he?" [...] "He said to me, 'I swear--by the woman I love--that I am your friend.' He was."
"He is."
And: "They're looking for him all over the world," [Rearden] said, smiling. "They'll never find him." The smile vanished. "Neither will I."
But of course, he does. :) Months later, one night, there is a kind of insurrection at the mills. Rearden gets hit in the head with a club -- and rescued. I'm sure you can guess by whom. [...] then the club crashed down on his skull from behind--and in the moment of splitting darkness when he wavered, refusing to believe it, then felt himself going down, he felt a strong, protective arm seizing him and breaking his fall, he heard a gun exploding an inch above his ear, then another explosion from the same gun in the same second, but it seemed faint and distant, as if he had fallen down a shaft.
Rearden wakes later in his office, and asks that the man who saved him be shown in. The door opened and he lay still. The man standing on the threshold, with disheveled hair, a soot-streaked face and furnace-smudged arms, dressed in scorched overalls and bloodstained shirt, standing as if he wore a cape waving behind him, was Francisco d'Anconia.
[...] Francisco smiled, a smile of greeting to a childhood friend on a summer morning, as if nothing else had ever been possible between them--and Rearden found himself smiling in answer, some part of him feeling an incredulous wonder, yet knowing that it was irresistibly right.
"You've been torturing yourself for months," said Francisco, approaching him, "wondering what words you'd use to ask my forgiveness and whether you had the right to ask it, if you ever saw me again--but now you see that it isn't necessary, that there's nothing to ask or to forgive."
"Yes, said Rearden, the word coming as an astonished whisper, but by the time he finished his sentence he knew that this was the greatest tribute he could offer, "yes, I know it."
Francisco sat down on the edge of the couch beside him, and slowly moved his hand over Rearden's forehead. It was like a healing touch that closed the past.
And just in case we weren't sure: "Tell me," said Rearden slowly, "that night at James Taggart's wedding, when you said you were after your greatest conquest... you meant me, didn't you?"
"Of course."
Informal address, at last! -- "I have a great deal to tell you," [Francisco] said. "But first, will you repeat a word you once offered me and I... I had to reject, because I knew that I was not free to accept it?"
Rearden smiled, "What word, Francisco?"
Francisco inclined his head in acceptance, and answered, "Thank you, Hank."
This is not Hank's lucky year. He later gets shot in the arm by the chief of a group of guards. Some of them saw Rearden sway, his right hand gripping his left shoulder. Others, in the same instant, saw the gun drop out of the chief's hand and hit the floor in time with his scream and with the spurt of blood from his wrist. Then all of them saw Francisco d'Anconia standing at the door on the left, his soundless gun still aimed at the chief.
And of course: Francisco had produced a first-aid kit and was removing Rearden's shirt to bandage his wound.
Shirtless wound-dressing FTW, you guys.
Now, as I mentioned, Hank and Francisco are both after the same girl. Francisco gives her up to Hank, and tells her, "if it had to be anyone, I'm glad it's he." But then she leaves Hank, too. Thus rendering both Hank and Francisco single.
Who the hell else, I ask you, are these fellows going to wind up with, apart from each other?
(And, fittingly, they are together, at Francisco's house, in front of his fireplace, in their last scene in the book. We'll ignore the fact that they're not alone. And focus on the fact that they're together.)
...And if you think this post was long, you should try reading the book!
Allow me to demonstrate.
Hank Rearden and Francisco d'Anconia. Both of them are in love with the same woman -- Dagny Taggart (who, we might observe, is herself scarcely female in anything but physical appearance). Hank owns a steel mill. Francisco owns copper mines. In the end, Dagny chooses to go with another man entirely -- and neither Hank nor Francisco resents this at all. Because of their philosophy, you see.
And also, clearly, because they are in love.
I've put the slashiest bits in bold, by the way, since there are so damned many. You have no idea how much slashiness I left out of this post.
So. Let's begin at the beginning. Hank does not like Francisco before he meets him... but Francisco wins him over pretty damn quickly. "Mr. Rearden," said a strangely quiet voice beside him, "permit me to introduce myself. My name is d'Anconia."
Rearden turned, startled; d'Anconia's manner and voice had a quality he had seldom encountered before: a tone of authentic respect.
And immediately, Hank becomes uncharacteristically desperate. Rearden's startled glance at him was like the involuntary thrust of a hand grasping for support in a desperate need. The glance betrayed how much he wanted to find the sort of man he thought he was seeing. Then Rearden lowered his eyes; almost closing them, slowly, shutting out the vision and the need. His face was hard; it had an expression of severity, an inner severity directed at himself; it looked austere and lonely.
Hank spends a lot of time trying not to like Francisco, and succeeds pretty well... until the very next time he runs into him.It was the muscles of his own face that made Rearden realize the nature of his reaction to Francisco's arrival: he noticed suddenly that he was smiling and that his face had been relaxed into the dim well-being of a smile for some minutes past, as he watched Francisco d'Anconia in the crowd.
He acknowledged to himself, for the first time, all the half-grasped, half-rejected moments when he had thought of Francisco d'Anconia and thrust the thought aside before it became the knowledge of how much he wanted to see him again. [...] He had caught himself glancing through the newspapers to see whether Francisco d'Anconida had returned to New York--and he had thrown the newspapers aside, asking himself angrily: What if he did return?--would you go chasing him through night clubs and cocktail parties?--what is it that you want from him?
This was what he had wanted--he thought, when he caught himself smiling at the sight of Francisco in the crowd--this strange feeling of expectation that held curiosity, amusement, and hope.
Hank listens as Francisco gives a big impromptu speech to some random wedding guests, and then they talk together. "What are you doing at this party?"
"Just looking for conquests."
"Found any?"
His face suddenly earnest, Francisco answered gravely, almost solemnly, "Yes--what I think is going to be my best and greatest."
Francisco is actually talking about Hank. Yes: canonically actually. :D But Hank assumes he's talking about some girl... Rearden's anger was involuntary, the cry, not of reproach, but of despair: "How can you waste yourself that way?"
The faint suggestion of a smile, like the rise of a distant light, came into Francisco's eyes as he asked, "Do you care to admit that you care about it?"
"You're going to hear a few more admissions, if that's what you're after."
And he does. Admissions like this one: "I wish--" Rearden began and stopped abruptly.
Francisco smiled. "Afraid to wish, Mr. Rearden?"
"I wish I could permit myself to like you as much as I do. "
"I'd give--" Francisco stopped; inexplicably, Rearden saw the look of an emotion which he could not define, yet felt certain to be pain; he saw Francisco's first moment of hesitation. "Mr. Rearden, do you own any d'Anconia Copper stock?"
Rearden looked at him, bewildered. "No."
"Some day, you'll know what treason I'm committing right now, but... Don't ever buy any d'Anconia Copper stock. Don't ever deal with d'Anconia Copper in any way."
"Why?"
"When you'll learn the full reason, you'll know whether there's ever been anything--or anyone--that meant a damn to me, and... and how much he did mean."
One day, after Hank hooks up with Dagny, he brings up the subject of Francisco to her. [...] when I look at him, I feel that if ever there was a man to whom I would entrust my life, he's the one."
She gasped. "Hank, are you saying that you like him?"
"I'm saying that I didn't know what it meant, to like a man, I didn't know how much I missed it--until I met him. "
"Good God, Hank, you've fallen for him!"
"Yes--I think I have." He smiled.
And one day, Francisco turns up at Hank's office at the steel mills. Ken Danagger, another industrialist, has just quit his business and disappeared. Francisco is thinking about this... but evidently Hank is only thinking about Francisco. :D"Why did you come here?"
"You don't want me to answer, Mr. Rearden. You wouldn't admit to me or to yourself how desperately lonely you are tonight. If you don't question me, you won't feel obliged to deny it. Just accept what you know, anyway: that I know it."
Taut like a string pulled by anger against the impertinence at one end and by admiration for the frankness at the other, Rearden answered, "I'll admit it, if you wish. What should it matter to me, that you know it?"
"That I know and care, Mr. Rearden. I'm the only man around you who does."
"Why should you care? And why should I need your help tonight?"
"Because it's not easy to have to damn the man who meant most to you."
"I wouldn't damn you if you'd only stay away from me."
Francisco's eyes widened a little, then he grinned and said, "I was speaking of Mr. Danagger."
For an instant, Rearden looked as if he wanted to slap his own face, then he laughed softly and said, "All right. Sit down."
While they're talking, the alarm sounds; one of the furnaces at the mills has broken. Francisco runs faster than Rearden to get to the furnace, and begins repairing it by an art "which Rearden had not believed any man to be trained to perform any longer." There was no time to form words, to think, to explain, but he knew that this was the real Francisco d'Anconia, this was what he had seen from the first and loved--the word did not shock him, because there was no word in his mind, there was only a joyous feeling that seemed like a flow of energy added to his own.
HE LOVES HIM. And then he saves his life, too, just for good measure. [...] he thought that a leap across the distance between them on the slippery, crumbling ridge would mean the death of both of them--and the second moment was when he landed at Francisco's side, held him in his arms, hung swaying together between space and ridge, over the white pit, then gained his footing and pulled him back, and, for an instant, still held the length of Francisco's body against the length of his own, as he would have held the body of his only son. His love, his terror, his relief were in a single sentence:
"Be careful, you goddamned fool!"
And by god if Hank doesn't then proceed to dress Francisco's wounds. Catering to the h/c crowd, much? :D"Are you hurt?"
"No... no, not at all."
"Come here," ordered Rearden, opening the door of his bathroom.
"Look at yourself."
"Never mind. You come here."
For the first time, Rearden felt that he was the older man; he felt the pleasure of taking Francisco in charge; he felt a confident, amused, paternal protectiveness. He washed the grime off Francisco's face, he put disinfectants and adhesive bandages on his temple, his hands, his scorched elbows. Francisco obeyed him in silence.
Was it really necessary to wash Francisco's face for him? Surely he is capable of washing his own face. So Hank must be doing this because he's enjoying it.
Later, Hank ends up staying at the same hotel where Francisco is staying, and decides to drop in, much as Francisco dropped in on him. [Rearden] had tried for hours to ignore an emotion that felt like the pull of homesickness: his awareness that the only man whom he longed to see was here, in this hotel, just a few floors above him.
He had caught himself, in the past few weeks, wasting time in the lobby whenever he entered the hotel or left it, loitering unnecessarily at the mail counter or the newsstand, watching the hurried currents of people, hoping to see Francisco d'Anconia among them. He had caught himself eating solitary dinners in the restaurant of the Wayne-Falkland, with his eyes on the curtains of the entrance doorway. Now he caught himself sitting in his room, thinking that the distance was only a few floors.
He rose to his feet, with a chuckle of amused indignation; he was acting, he thought, like a woman who waits for a telephone call and fights against the temptation to end the torture by making the first move. There was no reason, he thought, why he could not go to Francisco d'Anconia, if that was what he wanted. Yet when he told himself that he would, he felt some dangerous element of surrender in the intensity of his own relief.
Going upstairs, he enters and finds Francisco sprawled on the floor with a pencil and some blueprints.In a moment, Francisco raised his head. In the next instant, he flung his body upward to a kneeling posture, looking at Rearden with a smile of incredulous pleasure. In the next, he seized the drawings and threw them aside too hastily, face down.
"What did I interrupt?" asked Rearden.
"Nothing much. Come in." He was grinning happily. Rearden felt certain that Francisco had waited, too, had waited for this as for a victory which he had not quite hoped to achieve.
After a while, Francisco starts pacing and exclaiming about injustice. "Thanks," said Rearden.
"For what?"
"For what you're trying not to show. But don't worry about me. I'm still able to stand it... You know, I didn't come here because I wanted to talk about myself or even about the trial."
"I'll agree to any subject you choose--in order to have you here." He said it in the tone of a courteous joke; but the tone could not disguise it; he meant it. "What do you want to talk about?"
"You. "
Francisco stopped. He looked at Rearden for a moment, then answered quietly, "All right."
Francisco ends up giving a gigantic lecture about how sex is an expression of a man's own sense of value. Relevant to the slashiness is this bit: "[...] You're the man who would know that just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love--and just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool's self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one's code of values. It's the same issue, and you would know it."
Keep in mind, Hank has already admitted that he loves Francisco. If platonic love is "hypocrisy," and there's love between Hank and Francisco -- well, you work it out. ;)
During this talk, the boys say far too many mutually-adoring things to transcribe them all. But after a while, Rearden mentions to Francisco that he has bought a shipment of copper from Francisco's company. Francisco reacts with horror, and then despair. "Francisco... what's the matter?"
"Hank, I..." He shook his head, stopped, then stood up straight. "Mr. Rearden," he said, in a voice that had the strength, the despair, and the peculiar dignity of a plea he knew to be hopeless, "for the time when you're going to damn me, when you're going to doubt every word I said... I swear to you--by the woman I love--that I am your friend. "
The ships carrying the copper sink. For a while, Hank hates Francisco -- and when he walks in on Francisco and Dagny talking together, and discovers that she is the woman Francisco loves, he slaps Francisco across the face. The heir of the d'Anconias stood thrown back against a table, clasping the edge behind him, not to support himself, but to stop his own hands. [...] She saw his convulsed fingers struggling to grow fast to the table's edge, she wondered which would break first, the wood of the table or the bones of the man, and she knew that Rearden's life hung in the balance. [...]
Motionless but for the slow curve of his head, Francisco turned to Rearden. She saw his hands leave the edge of the table and hang relaxed by his sides. [...] there was nothing in Francisco's face except the exhaustion of effort, but Rearden knew suddenly how much this man had loved him.
After Francisco leaves, Dagny admits that he was her first love. Rearden fucks her senseless, in conquest. They then have a cigarette. She saw his eyes move to the entrance door once in a while and remain on it for long moments, as if he were still seeing the man who had left.
He said quietly, "He could have beaten me by letting me have the truth, any time he wished. Why didn't he?"
She shrugged, spreading her hands in a gesture of helpless sadness, because they both knew the answer. She asked, "He did mean a great deal to you, didn't he?"
"He does."
Many months later, Francisco blows up all of his own copper mines, and disappears. [Rearden] did not want to mention today's event, he did not want to speak of Francisco, but she noticed, as they sat at the table, that the strain of a resisted smile kept pulling at the hollows of his cheeks. She knew whom he meant, when he said suddenly, his voice soft and low with the weight of admiration, "He did keep his oath, didn't he?" [...] "He said to me, 'I swear--by the woman I love--that I am your friend.' He was."
"He is."
And: "They're looking for him all over the world," [Rearden] said, smiling. "They'll never find him." The smile vanished. "Neither will I."
But of course, he does. :) Months later, one night, there is a kind of insurrection at the mills. Rearden gets hit in the head with a club -- and rescued. I'm sure you can guess by whom. [...] then the club crashed down on his skull from behind--and in the moment of splitting darkness when he wavered, refusing to believe it, then felt himself going down, he felt a strong, protective arm seizing him and breaking his fall, he heard a gun exploding an inch above his ear, then another explosion from the same gun in the same second, but it seemed faint and distant, as if he had fallen down a shaft.
Rearden wakes later in his office, and asks that the man who saved him be shown in. The door opened and he lay still. The man standing on the threshold, with disheveled hair, a soot-streaked face and furnace-smudged arms, dressed in scorched overalls and bloodstained shirt, standing as if he wore a cape waving behind him, was Francisco d'Anconia.
[...] Francisco smiled, a smile of greeting to a childhood friend on a summer morning, as if nothing else had ever been possible between them--and Rearden found himself smiling in answer, some part of him feeling an incredulous wonder, yet knowing that it was irresistibly right.
"You've been torturing yourself for months," said Francisco, approaching him, "wondering what words you'd use to ask my forgiveness and whether you had the right to ask it, if you ever saw me again--but now you see that it isn't necessary, that there's nothing to ask or to forgive."
"Yes, said Rearden, the word coming as an astonished whisper, but by the time he finished his sentence he knew that this was the greatest tribute he could offer, "yes, I know it."
Francisco sat down on the edge of the couch beside him, and slowly moved his hand over Rearden's forehead. It was like a healing touch that closed the past.
And just in case we weren't sure: "Tell me," said Rearden slowly, "that night at James Taggart's wedding, when you said you were after your greatest conquest... you meant me, didn't you?"
"Of course."
Informal address, at last! -- "I have a great deal to tell you," [Francisco] said. "But first, will you repeat a word you once offered me and I... I had to reject, because I knew that I was not free to accept it?"
Rearden smiled, "What word, Francisco?"
Francisco inclined his head in acceptance, and answered, "Thank you, Hank."
This is not Hank's lucky year. He later gets shot in the arm by the chief of a group of guards. Some of them saw Rearden sway, his right hand gripping his left shoulder. Others, in the same instant, saw the gun drop out of the chief's hand and hit the floor in time with his scream and with the spurt of blood from his wrist. Then all of them saw Francisco d'Anconia standing at the door on the left, his soundless gun still aimed at the chief.
And of course: Francisco had produced a first-aid kit and was removing Rearden's shirt to bandage his wound.
Shirtless wound-dressing FTW, you guys.
Now, as I mentioned, Hank and Francisco are both after the same girl. Francisco gives her up to Hank, and tells her, "if it had to be anyone, I'm glad it's he." But then she leaves Hank, too. Thus rendering both Hank and Francisco single.
Who the hell else, I ask you, are these fellows going to wind up with, apart from each other?
(And, fittingly, they are together, at Francisco's house, in front of his fireplace, in their last scene in the book. We'll ignore the fact that they're not alone. And focus on the fact that they're together.)
...And if you think this post was long, you should try reading the book!